by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
After years of struggle, I finally know how *I* develop and write a novel. It makes how slow the process is very annoying. But the upside is I am also very addicted to knowing that I’m well on my way to at least not embarrassing myself. I’m working on the second draft of the first novel and I’ve re-worked it to the point that I’m very pleased.
Things are really beginning to fall into place after years of work.
This happens every once in a while, where I’ll have something of a reset in my vision of the series when something clicks and my writing and storytelling ability gets significantly better. The only downside is, I throw everything up in the air and have to start from scratch because what I had before was so fucking bad.
But the endgame makes it all worthwhile.
The latest reset happened when it occurred to me how I could “show, not tell” some pretty important elements of the story. One thing that makes all of this so fucking frustrating and slow is I have some very, very arbitrary rules that I force myself to abide by.
But there’s a point to these arbitrary rules — they force me to make decisions that I might not otherwise make. If I didn’t have these rules, each of these novels might end up being 1,000 pages. So, while in the short term having some pretty weird rules about structure slow me down significantly, the end project is going to be really, really good.
And, what’s more, these 5 novels are so autobiographical that should you read them all, you will know way, way, way too much about my personal history. So, in a sense, the power of these novels is how “true” they are. They’re my own life story, only told out of order and conflated in various ways to protect the guilty. But being able to lay out to my audience my life story in fictional form is one of the things that makes all this struggle worth it.
Yet, I really need to stop fucking around. I need to get this shit done sooner rather than later. I have five solid concepts and I’m not getting any younger. I have to produce something.
